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8155511
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We are a society of notoriously unhappy people: lonely, anxious, depressed, destructive, dependent -- people who are glad when we have killed the time we are trying so hard to save.
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philosophy
economics-philosophy
modern-society
consumerism
psychology
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Erich Fromm |
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c232494
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You swallow hard when you discover that the old coffee shop is now a chain pharmacy, that the place where you first kissed so-and-so is now a discount electronics retailer, that where you bought this very jacket is now rubble behind a blue plywood fence and a future office building. Damage has been done to your city. You say, ''It happened overnight.'' But of course it didn't. Your pizza parlor, his shoeshine stand, her hat store: when they were here, we neglected them. For all you know, the place closed down moments after the last time you walked out the door. (Ten months ago? Six years? Fifteen? You can't remember, can you?) And there have been five stores in that spot before the travel agency. Five different neighborhoods coming and going between then and now, other people's other cities. Or 15, 25, 100 neighborhoods. Thousands of people pass that storefront every day, each one haunting the streets of his or her own New York, not one of them seeing the same thing.
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loss
individuality
memories
change
mom-and-pop-stores
retail
modern-society
transience
neighborhoods
new-york-city
consumerism
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Colson Whitehead |
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fd5e0e8
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[The modern age] knows nothing about isolation and nothing about silence. In our quietest and loneliest hour the automatic ice-maker in the refrigerator will cluck and drop an ice cube, the automatic dishwasher will sigh through its changes, a plane will drone over, the nearest freeway will vibrate the air. Red and white lights will pass in the sky, lights will shine along highways and glance off windows. There is always a radio that can be turned to some all-night station, or a television set to turn artificial moonlight into the flickering images of the late show. We can put on a turntable whatever consolation we most respond to, Mozart or Copland or the Grateful Dead.
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loneliness
silence
shallowness
modern-society
stillness
isolation
peace
noise
technology
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Wallace Stegner |
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876bca2
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My biggest problem with modernity may lie in the growing separation of the ethical and the legal
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court-system
courts
ethical-behaviour
governement
modern-society
the-supreme-court
modern-life
modernity-is-a-sickness
law-and-order
corruption
lawyers
law
ethics
government
modernity
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Nassim Nicholas Taleb |
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0913af8
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At my glummest, I sometimes think women get to chose- between being punished for being unsubjugated and the continual punishment of subjugation.
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subjugation
modern-society
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Rebecca Solnit |
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18a61c0
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...it seemed a part of her life, to step from the ancient to the modern, back and forth. She felt rather sorry for those who knew only one and not the other. It was better, she thought, to be able to select from the whole menu of human achievements than to be bound within one narrow range.
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traditional-society
modern-society
modern
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Orson Scott Card |
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df3776a
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"People with Books. What, in 2007, could be more incongruous than that? It makes me want to laugh." [ ]"
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reading
books
modern-society
modern-life
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Michael Chabon |